Excerpts from the Book

Eighth-Grade Boys

Reach out, and like the

newly molted crayfish in the room’s
aquarium, they scuttle away in their
suddenly too-big bodies, raw

behind claws displayed in attitudes
of threat and challenge.

Some girls are thrilled by this.

A Found Poem
From the Top Ten things learned in 2K

Number one
I lernd
to praktes
speling

The Sonogram

The polls she takes are inconclusive.
the boys voting for a boy and the girls
voting for a girl.

She then resorts to paper fortune tellers,
snapping them open and closed in a mantra
designed to snatch from the ether the secret
of the baby’s sex.

Will it be a new brother?
Will it be a new siter?

The odds prove 50:50.

Thursday she leaves early from school
to be with her mother at the doctor’s.

With science comes certainty.
“We will know tomorrow,”
she tells us.

Friday morning she slinks into class,
tapes a picture to the chalkboard, and
slumps down into her desk.

We all gather round the grainy black and gray photo.

There, like the image in the sweep
of a radar screen are two legs
crossed in perfect modesty.

Don’t Tread on Us

They teach you
in the schools of education to
reach the individual.

You’re armed with Bloom’s Taxonomy and
Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences to fire
off lesson plans targeting
every single student.

You’re trained to see all classrooms as
multicultural cocoons of individual pupae.
No child is to be left behind.

Now walk through the portal of
a fifth-grade classroom.

Inside are staring, hungry eyes.
Not the trusting orbs of the blind hatchling,
but the narrow focus of the wolf pack.

Russell Fee